


Bargaining a Year

by SpaceAsthmatic



Category: TOLKIEN J. R. R. - Works & Related Fandoms, The Lord of the Rings - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: About to Die, Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Bargaining, Caring Thranduil, Depression, Elves, Elves fadeing, F/M, Good Parent Thranduil, Grim Reapers, Halls of Mandos, Heart-to-Heart, Heartbreak, Heavy Angst, Matter of Life and Death, Mirkwood, Missing Persons, Parent Thranduil, Post-War of the Ring, Pre- Greenwood knowing that Legolas lived, Protective Thranduil, References to Depression, Sad with a Happy Ending, She didn't mean to do it though, Suicide Attempt, since they dont where legolas is lol
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-01
Updated: 2020-04-01
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:14:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23426080
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SpaceAsthmatic/pseuds/SpaceAsthmatic
Summary: When Eru made elves he made them with astoundingly strong emotions. Emotions so strong, in fact, that they can die from a broken heart. Or a hopeless one. Waiting for the one you love to return from the black gates is about as hopeless as it gets. It's a good thing Mandos is an old softy on the inside, especially for tragic love stories. (Beren and Luthien, anyone?
Relationships: Legolas Greenleaf & Thranduil, Legolas Greenleaf/Original Female Character(s), Thranduil (Tolkien) & Original Female Character(s)
Comments: 3
Kudos: 37





	Bargaining a Year

**Author's Note:**

> This fix is super loosely a lil prequel to "Effects of War" but you dont gotta read that to understand.

**This fic is sort of a very gentle prequel to “Effects of War,” but you don't have to read or be aware of any of that to read and understand this one. Hope you enjoy!!**

**0.0.0.0..0**

“How long have you been standing there?” She asked, eyes still staring numbly ahead not even bothering to take in the awe-inspiring sight that continuously unrolled in front of her. Her forest home and the lands beyond, witnessed from where she sat on nearly the highest peak of their mountain home. All below her finally at peace. 

Yet not even that could take her breath away anymore, but oh how she wished that it could. The least it could do was breathe some sort of life back into her. 

“Longer than you probably would like.” The other entity answered, voice somehow both more wispy and concrete than she had expected it to be. But most importantly, and most surprisingly, the voice was more peaceful than any summer meadow in full bloom. Warmer and more comforting than the warmest blanket after being out in the cold rain, it was like open arms waiting for her. 

Avaleina nodded absently, unable to bring herself to so much as blink or move her gaze. She was too tired to expend such energy. She didn’t know if she even had enough energy left to speak out loud, but then, she supposed when interacting with a Valar that did not matter, “Not surprised.”

It had taken her some time to realize what was happening to her, what this encroaching and lingering emptiness might mean. Probably meant. Certainly meant. Yet not even that knowledge could urge her into some sort of action. 

“I am,” The voice said, the one that was said out loud, in her heart, and in her soul, “You have fought me so viciously on so many occasions sometimes it feels like I myself have lost count. I did not think that I would ever see you again, not unless it was in our home.” 

She thought that she would be more curious as to what Mandos looked liked when her time finally came to be welcomed to heal into his home. Now the thought didn’t even ghost the depths of her mind. 

But then, she had always expected to die a death surrounded by nothing by horrible sights and worse feelings. Now it was beautiful sights and void numbness. 

“I’m so tired.” Was the only reason or explanation her mind could think to spit out, “I’m tired of being in this body with the weight of everything that its done. But this is who I am, a product of war. Endless, relentless war.”

There was a small rumble that might have been some sort of hum in agreement but that was the only sound that came from next to her for several long moments. So she took the lull in conversation as an opportunity to force herself to blink, all but dragging her eyes back open with physical force. 

“They turned you into a weapon, and told you to find peace.” 

Normally she would have snorted in irony at the comment, especially as the music from the celebration below them swelled with pride and enthusiasm, but such dramatics didn’t matter now. Nothing really mattered anymore. 

Nothing else had mattered aside from saving their kingdom and their people from the darkness intent on ending them for as long as she could remember. Nothing else could matter, there was no time for it and even fewer pieces of heart to give. It did not take long before it felt like they could never possibly have energy for anything but the war.

But the hurt from it. 

She spread out her arms in a welcoming gesture, her fingertips seeming to dust across the treetops of each individual tree, “Well. here it is. Peace. We found it.” 

“You haven’t,” Mandos said, and Avaleina tried to ignore how not even such knowing, brutal honesty could make her heart race. It felt like it was hardly even beating at all anymore. 

Her fingers were growing cold, she ignored that too. 

“No,” She tried to agree but almost no sound came out. She cleared her throat and tried again, “I haven’t.” 

“Why?” 

“Because somehow I remained foolish enough, worse than a child, to think that the stain and the weight of my actions could be washed away if I cried enough tears.” Even now, with Mandos standing inches away while her kingdom celebrated their victory below, she could not bring herself to cry. 

Not for anything. Not even for all of her lost friends. 

Part of her would have liked to think it was because she wasn’t that foolish anymore, that she had learned her lesson about the cleaning quality of tears. 

Most of her knew it was because she didn’t care enough to cry anymore. Maybe she no longer cared about herself, “Peace remains floating on a delicate cloud above my head, far too dainty for the weight attached to me.” 

“Where has all of your sturdy hope gone?” Mandos asked in what she wanted to think was a warm manner but she could not be sure, “It has carried you all the way from the burnt crisp of your parents village to your victory, but it cannot get you beyond it?”

“I had always assumed that the war would end me before we would ever be able to end it, I had always seemed there was rest and healing at the end of this. Now, there isn’t anything at all.”

The voice got a little bit closer but she didn’t look to see how close, feeling quite like an injured deer in a forest listening to starving wolves creep closer through the underbrush, “That is your source of disappointment, nor your source of hope.” 

This time, she did snort a small laugh at the irony of the situation, and a few tears did sip form her eyes. That was the last thing left for her to care about right now, and she would always be a hopeless fool for her source of hope. “He went to Rivendell and never came back. I’ve been informed that his next stop was the Black Gates of Mordor with an army of three hundred..”

She made herself blink again, mostly to force some of her lingering tears out of her eyes. Although she couldn’t bring her arms up to wipe them away. 

To her surprise, they vanished as if another had dabbled a handkerchief on her cheeks. “Then what has gotten you this far?” Mandos asked in that almost warm manner. 

The answer came from a numb brain to the still air, Avaleina hardly even recognized it was her that had spoken even after she heard the words out loud, “My determination to put an end to all the deadly monsters in my forest. Now the only monster left is me.” 

The wind caught the words and self deprecations and swept them away, but it didn’t matter. It was not the first time such thoughts had been born into this world from her thoughts. 

This time there was a sound that seemed suspiciously like a tut of disapproval from beside her, “The only monster within you is your need for a good and wholesome rest.” 

“Then let me rest.” She almost pleaded, her body growing even more leaden. Pulling her to the ground, urging her to come to lay amongst the grass on this small plateau and never leave it. 

“I meant rest as in to sleep,” Mandos corrected. 

The nightmares from the past several weeks echoed in her head, somehow all worse than the last in their own uniquely terrifying ways, she didn’t bother to explain any of that. Instead, she nearly snapped, “When they told me that you would come to bring me to the halls, I did not think that I would have to win a battle of wits to get there.” 

“Even death has to be earned, Avaleina.” 

“Have I not earned it? This soul, trapped in a body so heavy with the memories of violence and twisted in every direction with scars?” The ghost of a comforting hand rested on her shoulders 

“You have earned it more than almost every soul that has ever come through my halls,” Mandos soothed, she hated to admit that it was oddly calming. “But yet every time I came to you, you bit, kicked, scratched, and screamed against me. Yet, this time you climb up here to call for me and argue for your own death?” 

Her eyes slid closed, and even the breeze was numb on her face.

There were a few absent sounds in the air like the music from her people and the birds but they sounded distorted and faraway. She could see the glow of the sun on her closed eyelids, but could not feel the warmth on her face. The ground below her might as well have been made of clouds drifting on air, making her waver back and forth without even noticing. 

If he would not take her of his own will, maybe that’s what she would do. Fall from a height so tall that he would have no choice but to take her to the halls. Her eyes opened by the power of some external force, and she stopped swaying as if firm hands had been placed on either of her shoulders. 

“A deal,” Mandos stated rather than offered. 

This time, she did look at him. If only out of complete and utter shock.

He was more a shimmery and hazy outline of a massive looming shape than anything truly identifiable. He appeared to be wearing long flowing robes of blacks, whites, greys, and other colors she had no name for with a hood pulled deep over his head. Even so she could tell that there were not eyes on what appeared to be his face. 

Yet at the same instant, her brain tried to insist that there was nothing and nobody there at all. Even as she watched him shimmer next to her, her brain screamed that there was nobody there to see.

She asked, “A deal?” 

“Wait one year,” Mandos said. “One year, and if you still yearn for the rest only I can offer you, I will provide it.”

“A year?” She whispered, desperate and exhausted. “Can you promise me that there is something that will appear within that year to make my staying on this earth worth the sheer pain and grit it will take to get there?” 

“I cannot promise that. I cannot promise anything.” 

“I daresay that you are one of the only entities created that can.” 

“But I am forbidden.” 

“How convenient.” Several more tears leaked out of her eyes as the small grains of hope she had collected were sent scattering again. This time she didn’t bother to chase them. She no longer even held hope that Legolas might return to her. 

She had no energy for such things. Her eyes slipped closed again. 

Everything began to drift away from her. Her memories and experiences twisting out into the wind like brittle leaves. Years and years of life came spilling out, the ones of Legolas were the last to go. 

The only tear that her body had drifted out of her body with it. 

Then was nothing left insider her. Not even exhaustion. Not even the ability to regester that her bones were not aching like they were broken for the need for rest, didn’t notice that her head and her eye felt heavier than a bear. 

There was nothing. She was nothing. 

All was nothing. 

Without warning everything that had fled her body was folded neatly back between her hands and tucked away safely back inside. “Wait one year,” Mandos repeated, somehow both more sternly and gently simultaneously than before. 

It reminded her of Thranduil. 

Thranduil. 

Legolas had gone. Legolas and so many others were so far away from her, but Thranduil was still here. 

And he would be devastated and shattered if he were to find out that after every evil creature or trap that she survived, through the entire war, just for her to fade away alone on top of their mountain home. Not even a few miles above him. 

He would never forgive himself, not even after she was brought back from the halls. Not even after the end of time. 

“A year?” Avaleina asked. 

The wind blew and she knew that she was alone again. She opened her eyes startled to find that this time she was laying on the ground on her back and right side. The sky that had been so much brighter just one blink ago was now almost pitch black except for the stars that danced endlessly above.

She almost hated them for how joyfully they continued to glitter. 

She forced herself upright and took a shuddering breath, one that felt like the first one she had taken in hours. The gulping breaths in her lungs forced her to take one after the other in what almost seemed like an unending succession supported to her theory. 

Her limbs and extremities all began to tingle widely like she had been sleeping in such a position that it cut off all of the blood flow to her entire body. It burned her veins almost like spider venom, and her heart raced in her chest faster than when she ran forty miles. 

Avaliena’s sluggish brain hated that she had next to no idea at all about how late it was, how long she had been lying there, or even when she had fallen asleep. 

Had that interaction been nothing more than a vivid dream? Fabrications and lies twisted and trotted out in front of her by her mind like some sort of terrified puppet master?

“Puppets would be less tired,” She mumbled to nobody in particular.

“One year.” The wind whispered to her as it drifted by her ear. 

Closing her eyes she laid back down on the grass. She still did not have enough energy to make it back down the mountain, and she contemplated just falling back asleep right then and there. 

And she likely would have, had Thranduil not given her mind a sharp and direct tug. Concern and urgentness bred from being ignored for so long enveloped her soul from Eru only knew where. 

Avaleina took that to mean that she had been missing for a noticeable amount of time. 

With all the willpower and power in general that she possed, Ava dragged herself back into a sitting position once again with the full intentions of trying to stand. But even doing that took up the last of her reserves, and she flopped back down. 

She had never been able to understand how an elf could possibly fade away, just lay down and do nothing as the world happened around them. How they could care so little about the world and those around him. 

Now she understood. 

It was not that they did not care. It was that they had nothing left to give. They already gave it all 

Now she understood. 

It was not that they did nothing, it was they had already done too much. Far too much. 

Thranduil tugged at her again, and reluctantly she allowed her location to be relayed by the trees. She felt his surprise at her location, and further pressing questions about why she was there but couldn’t bring herself to react. 

The next time she blink-slept and opened her eyes Thranduil was standing over her looking just as concerned as he had felt internally, “Ava?” 

“I’m fine, just tired.” Her voice was like gravel. 

Thranduil’s face melted from concern to a sense of deep sadness, “I’ve been tired like that before.” 

“I’m sorry,” She managed to say, her own heart down turning at the thought of Thranduil laying somewhere just as helpless and empty as she was right now. She wondered when the last time was that he had felt such a thing. She wondred if it was when Legolas was still small or not. 

Or if it had been much closer in time than that, and it was simply that none of them had actually noticed his pain. Or exhaustion, as the case may be. 

She hoped at the very least that Ferdan had noticed him. 

He sat down in the grass next to her head, “Me too.” 

With a great effort, she tried to pull herself back into a sitting position but quickly found herself assisted. Thranduil moved her so that her back was resting against the same piece of rock as he was, and then leaned her into his side where he could put an arm around her to hold her upright.

His hand began sliding comfortingly up and down her arm which finally brought a few sparks of heat to her body, and a few of her pins and needles began to diminish. She closed her eyes with the safe sound of Thranduil’s heartbeat in her ear. 

“I made a deal,” She mumbled without prompting, “I told Mandos that I would wait one year.”

“Do you think you can last a year?” His voice was soft and unjudging, betraying his constant internal need to do everything physically possible to help those around him. 

Her heart tried to slow its beating down once again, slow it until all the cold crept back into her limbs and the grass called her back into their arms. The strength of Thranduil’s heartbeat was the only thing that kept that from happening, almost as if it had one hand on the back of her heartbeats neck and was forcing it to come along with his own like a haustage. 

Which it very well might have been, Avaleina had seen his magic accomplish hundreds of ‘impossible’ feats. 

Thranduil made a slight adjustment and an even greater warmth enveloped her as his robe was nearly wrapped around her entirely. It did nothing ease her tired pain, but it did stop the ache of her skin. 

“We will find out, I guess,” Avaleina mumbled, the words half-muffled by Thranduil’s chest and robe. 

“How certain are you that you can make it a year? Thranduil asked, more gentle than even the softest satin silk. 

She managed to gather the strength to shrug, “About as certain as I have been that I will make it to the end of any other year for the past several centuries.” 

“Could be worse, then,” Thranduil answered, adjusting his arm again to draw her just a little bit closer. 

“Could be.” She agreed. 

Against her will, her eyes drifted closed again and he waited for her to drift fully to sleep before asking the universe at large, “Please be home within a year, my little leaf. Or at the very least, find a way to send word to us that you are still walking on the earth with us.”

“With her,” He clarified even though he was aware that it would have not effect on the outcome. 

He tilted his head back to get a better look at the stars, “You two are so close to finally reaching that forever elusive ‘Maybe later’ time of being together. Give her something to draw energy from, help it light her way for she is so lost in all of her darkness.” 

Thranduil carefully stood then, lifting Avaleina with him so that he could lay her somewhere more comfortable, and more observed for her own safety. 

As he turned to walk down the only path that could lead to this remote peak, he saw the distinct sign of a Valar purposefully ‘cloaking themselves to be invisible, and unnoticable.’ A trick that Thranduil had grown quite accustomed to Lady Yavanna using herself. Thranduil briefly wondered if everything that had been created by Eru was unstoppable from walking the finest line possible every time they were given one. 

“Thank you,” He said in the old Silvan tongue. It was the one he always used for communicating with the divine, it felt more fitting to the occasion. He had no real logical explanation for it, “For sparing her. I will keep a better eye on her, you will not have to do so again.” 

The shimmer seemed to swish around a bit in what might have been some sort of acknowledgement of the commnet, and then the air was cut with the crisp sound of a door snapping closed. 

Thankfully, Avaleina was still on this side of that door with him. 

**0.0.0..0.0.**

**Thanks for reading!!! Can’t wait to hear your thoughts!!**

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading!!! Cant wait to read your review 🥰💛


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